By Laura RozenLaura Rozen writes The Cable daily at ForeignPolicy.com.

May 18, 2009 - 9:51 pm

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been on foreign travel since Friday. Traveling with him is Frank Lowestein, the chief counsel of the committee.

While Hill staffers thought the trip seemed unusually hush-hush, SFRC spokesman Fred Jones said that is not the case. Kerry has been at the World Economic Forum being held at the Dead Sea in Jordan, and for meetings with Jordanian King Abdullah II. (Also representing the administration at the Forum was Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s senior advisor for intergovernmental affairs and public liaison.) Afterwards, Kerry stopped off in Rome for meetings in preparation for the Copenhagen climate change negotiations to be held at the end of the year.

While some Hill folk wondered whether Kerry might have also stopped in at the secret Bilderberg Group meeting being held in Athens (deputy secretary of state Jim Steinberg and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are reportedly among those attending), Jones said Kerry absolutely did not go to Bilderberg.

Kerry is pulling back into Washington this evening. The chairman along with ranking Republican Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) plan to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a meeting with other senators in the Capitol-116 tomorrow at 9 a.m.

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Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.

Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.

A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.

Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C.

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Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.

Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.

A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.

Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C.